Hearts and Houses
by Kitty Ryan
Summary: Life for those on the brink of completing their novitiate can be tumultuous. Lark and Rosethorn, before they knew-or were-each other. A love story in four parts. Written as part of the Goldenlake Ficmas Exchange
1. Scaffolding

_**Hearts and Houses**_

K. Ryan, 2010 – for EmberFyire, on Goldenlake's Ficmas Exchange

* * *

Note: This is not an AU. It's just my "When Rosethorn Met Lark" story, written for a dear friend. I have, however, used Lark's pre-Dedicate name of _Paraskeve_, here, as I do in _Speculation_. It's just become part of the personal canon. This story is, however, set in the same world as _Festival Sweets _and _New Geographies_, though they all stand alone from each other.

* * *

**1. Scaffolding

* * *

**

"It shall not be long."

The supervision of those on the brink of completing their novitiate—too old to be compliant, too young to be useful—was a thankless task. Glaring up at Dedicate Elmsbrook—no, _First Dedicate _Elmsbrook, since her old teacher added a new border to her habit sometime over the past three years—Niva did not care. She would be as thankless as ever she might. It was the right response to being treated like a child.

She flinched under the tall, whip-thin woman's hand, eyes slipping from the pinched, harried face, and then further: safely away from the hand that clenched, tightening the girl's white habit and streaking it with familiar dirt. Niva scowled at her feet. She felt them shift over ground still damp from the Sap Moon rains. Elmsbrook shook her, lightly, and the wall of the Hub was a looming judgement against her back. Winding Circle rushed around them, unconcerned.

"You _can't _tell me you want to go back to the Earth Dormitories."

"_You _can't think I want to share an even smaller space with some group of staring-eyed idiots who can't tie their own sandals!" Niva felt her face flush. "My _magic_ is fine," she said, hating that the blood beating at her temples and her cheeks felt ruined, somehow—humiliation leaking into what would have been good, clean anger. "So fine, in fact, that you _sent me_ to—"

"—and perhaps Lightsbridge was not the idea we had hoped." Elmsbrook had a soft voice, with air caught all up within it, though Niva had never found it easy to shout her down. "And, girl," another small shake. "It is your _heart_ that isn't fine."

Niva wrenched herself back. She'd knock the woman down if she could. Knock her down and—"Don't tell me that after three whole _years _in that blasted place that it wasn't a good idea."

Elmsbrook let her hands fall to her sides in tight fists. "Novice Niva," she said, so quiet that, if the girl had not already known the words the Dedicate was shaping, she would have been forced to lean forward. "If you wish to be Dedicated by Midsummer, you shall go to Discipline."

* * *

"This," Niko sniffed. "Is _dire_."

Paraskeve rolled her eyes while the mage paced the kitchen—_her_ new kitchen, she supposed. It certainly had not been anyone else's for some time. But with the young Master Goldeye striding through it and hitching his overrobes out of the way of dead insects and dust, the clutter became charming. Even dust and dead insects were charming, when they provoked this sort of outcry. Over the three years she had spent in Winding Circle, Paras had stopped wondering if all the magic and beauty and gratitude in her new world would make her less perverse.

Niko halted beside her, and Paras took a moment admire the rich, charcoal broadcloth of his robe, perfectly complimenting the burgeoning silver in his hair. He had the garment long as she'd known him, but the fibres still felt plush to her, well cared for and content—and as in place upon his body as he, so dressed, had been _out _of place in Summersea's Mire. Looking up into his exasperated face, Paras could also see that his new moustache was still coming on in patches. She patted his arm.

"It's not so bad," she said. "It's even _pretty_." Her eye was caught by a faint, damp stain on the opposite wall and she smiled, a little crooked. "Or, it could be."

The man sniffed. "I don't know what Moonstream was thinking, sending you here."

"Well, you can't demand for her to explain herself unless you're a committee," Paras murmured.

Niko's answering smile was faint. "We could team up?" He eyed the table in the centre of the room critically, resting his hand upon it only to groan, remembering the dust.

"Niko," said Paraskeve. "You are far too busy to follow one Novice around, lamenting the furniture."

He swallowed. "_You_, Paras, are not merely 'one novice'," he said, after a long pause that he had apparently spent examining the stain on the wall. It looked as if it might, with the right encouragement, ooze. "You're— "

"—You like to keep track of your visions." Paras kissed his cheek, feeling her own bright linen habit rustle down her back and arms. "But you _did _find me, and I am being taught, and I haven't made anyone's clothing disintegrate in over a year, and—"

"—and you are perfectly fine, Good Novice. As you wish." Niko grinned at her. "I just don't understand why you've been sent _here._" He eyed her, then, and reached out to tuck one spiral of dark curls neatly behind her ear. "And I believe at least one of the...incidents with clothing was deliberate. At least according to Brightfinch."

"She didn't believe I could do it," Paras answered simply. "Not Brightfinch—"

"—Gods forefend—"

"—though she _was _the one to catch us."

As Niklaren Goldeye left the dilapidated structure of damp stone and rotting thatch that made Discipline Cottage, Paras was laughing.

* * *

"You."

"_You_."

Isas smelled of indigo. The dye did nothing so base as to stain his long, fine hands, but the scent of it hung about in an acrid cloud, as familiar to Niva as the air in her own lungs. That air caught, now, and she glared at him as she coughed.

"Choking to see me, clearly."

His voice had not changed. Of course, it _would _not change, not in the few months they had been back in Winding Circle, and not in any of the years she had known him, since his voice had first broken from starling shrill into the light baritone that could not, sometimes, avoid warmth. It would not change now, just because she hated him.

She had _always _hated him. And that was not the point.

He was staring at her. "You really _do _look dreadful," he said, and there _was_ a change in his voice, this time. But it was familiar pattern-magic to her: his vowels stripped and slightly raw with the day's bundle of shocks. Today's shock, apparently, was her just face. "I never noticed."

About to shout at him for the unobservant, overfed pup that he was, Niva caught her breath. He was shaking his head, now, and dark, fine hair was failing into his eyes, but she could also see that he was smiling, just a little. He really had _no right_ to laugh at himself, she thought savagely. It made _her _laugh, and then everything was all over.

She shrugged, looking away from him. "You were busy Lording it and coming second to me in Botany," she said, only a little strangled.

"There is no shame in taking advantage of one's connections—"

"—when one has no shame." Niva did laugh, then, at his outraged squawk, and it felt good, even if she did have to talk to him. "Was it really second?" she added wickedly. "I'm sure you managed to drop a third..."

Isas sighed. "You mustn't be all that bad if you're tormenting me," he said, with some loftiness. "Though you won't see _me _stopping your exile."

"Oh, you know about that, do you?" Niva stepped back from him. The light was shifting, angling their shadows sharply out to the side. Scuffing one foot in the dirt, she made sure to keep her own entirely free from his.

"It added sweetness to my tea this morning," he said. "But I don't quite understand, Niva. We both came back. We both, with—ahem—some _minor _discrepancies, achieved the same result. We are..." he shrugged. "Excellent."

Niva, looking at him, knew her friend believed every word he said, just as he always did. It made her shake him. That, and the small noise of protest that had nothing to do with surprise or invaded space, and everything to do with the state of his white clothes. She shook him, and felt how thin and small her fingers were, and how Isas noticed nothing because he was distracted by the closeness of her mouth. He kissed her, hard and brief. She pulled away.

Grinning, she wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.

"Isas," she said. "I would torment you from Death's garden, itself. That's the first thing." She held her fingers out in a counting position, while Isas flushed, mottled and dark under his fine-grained but sallow skin. "The second is that while _two_ people went into Karang, only one-and-a-half came back out."

He was still staring after her as she turned her back on him, and kept to Winding Circle's northern road.

* * *

The first thing Niva noticed about Discipline was that it was a mouldering hovel. With oversprouted barley doing nothing useful out one side, and bedraggled nasturtiums overflowing their beds and twining in sharp-scented abundance with mint and oregano, she wasn't sure if the chaos excited her or simply made her teeth ache. Her words to Isas spun in her head, sharp-edged and melodramatic. They made her face burn. If Elmsbrook heard such things, she'd be sent to somewhere soft and restrained in the Water Temple, with soothing fountains, rather than simply here. Foolishness, all of it.

The second thing Niva noticed about Discipline Cottage, mouldering hovel, was that a girl was doing a handstand on the roof.

* * *

Paras had come down breathless and laughing when she heard the yells. They were sharp, but also held a bewildered note that made the girl grin as she pulled a fresh habit on over her sweat dampened shirt and old, dancer's leggings. She came down, expecting, perhaps, a horrified Dedicate, sure that the roof would cave in. Perhaps one of the more serious-minded Fire or Water types, intent on pressing the gravity of contemplative life upon her ragged self.

The Novice in the garden had hands caught in fists and nasturtiums rioting around her ankles, full of sunset orange and _yaskedasu_-gold. They bloomed, though Paras knew they had already been wilting, and her eyes were fierce and narrow beneath the wide brim of a straw hat. Paras saw glints of red off her eyelashes that made her wonder, briefly, at the shade of the hair beneath it. Her white habit was streaked with dirt to the knee, and she was possibly—despite Para's years with acrobats and many months in slums—one of the thinnest girls Paraskeve had ever seen.

This temple girl was worrisome, with collarbones that were not, she suspected, generally _meant _to be seen, not the way some bodies' bones were. She was thin and peaky and glaring at her fit to set something on fire.

Paras held out both hands.

"I'm not sure that we've met. Did I startle you up there? Novice Paraskeve."

"_You _live here?"

Her voice brought Paras back to a season of rain, her father swallowing flames and swords and walking sticks in the market squares of Anderran. "Yes," she said. "I haven't, long. I'm supposed to remake the place." She smiled wryly, turning a little to nod at the seeping structure behind her. "Or do my best."

The girl snorted.

"Yes. Well. I have some time." Paras considered her, taking in the bruised eyes not quite hidden by her irritated expression, and the fine, white lines that anger made around her full, pretty mouth. "I have also requisitioned a kettle," she ventured. "There can be tea."

"There'd _best _be." The stranger-Novice removed her hat, Paras nodding to herself as deep chestnut hair that picked up a day's surfeit of red and gold, stuck up in short, messed waves over her head. She held the hat firmly under one arm, and kept the other defensively raised at the level of her chest. "I am supposed to live here. And tea might be the only thing to keep this liveable."

* * *

**_To be continued_**


	2. Walls and Doors

**Hearts and Houses**

_K. Ryan, 2010

* * *

_**2. Walls and Doors

* * *

**

_One month later_

"Bihan," said Paraskeve. "Early morning, in the south, usually taken with soy."

Niva groaned as Paras let the dark leaves crumble between her fingers and settle back in its wooden box. Light caught her face as she smiled, and the warm, brown skin was almost the same shade as the varnish stained her tea-chest. Niva laid her head on the table she had spent a week scrubbing, and let herself enjoy its trapped midday heat. She could hear Paras still fossicking through her tea supplies. All unlabeled. Niva had never needed such things.

Neither, it seemed, did Paras. "Ah! Smoked Narmornese. Not Dancruan, I think. They prefer a lot more cherry. This is—"

"Applewood, Kuanling half-furled, dried mint. And close to the border." Niva mumbled, not looking up. "Rather vile, actually. But it gives good dreams."

"I remember." The sound of tea-leaves against the girl's fingertips was not so different, Niva thought, to autumn. Crunching sounds and fragrance, all in miniature.

Paras's voice was distant. "A friend of my papa liked it, and we were sure to bring some back with us on the Namorn tour. And one of my neighbours..."

Niva looked up as Paras shrugged, lips pinching. "A neighbour. From the Yanjing side of the border, in her youth. She hoarded it."

Niva cleared her throat, hauling a smile into her voice. "Well," she said, standing and picking her way to the kitchen bench she had watched, with no little awe, Paras construct from ancient and usually intractable pine. "You're _good _with tea. Isas and I used to make a game out of it—tea, dyes, perfumes. We'd pick them apart and guess the ingredients. You'd certainly beat _him._" She began sorting through a few more of her stores. "And I don't think either of us would put geography to it."

Paras laughed, though whether it was in pleasure—or simply in response to Niva's awkward attempts at small talk—Niva could not be sure. "It's because of that large and sprawling life I've had," she said, teasing and low and entirely too knowing. "It _fascinates _you so."

"Oh, it does _not_—Paras, stop that!"

There was true laugher now, bouncing off the still-damp walls exposed roof beams and carnage of the cottage's reconstruction. Niva scowled into the sink.

"Well, _fine_," she snapped. "But you—you _are _more interesting than the rest of the flibbertigibbets I've seen of thread mages. All fey Water Temple types, embroidering before they could talk and even _then _just saying shiny, floating things. You didn't even..." Niva swallowed. "You've known about ambient magic—how long, two years?"

"Three."

"_Three_ years." Turning, Niva found she was grinning at the dark-eyed woman, who was regarding her with polite interest, head tilted to the side. Niva looked away. "It's a little bit frightening," she said, dry. "The idea that you were out there, just..._living_, and Niklaren _Goldeye_ come and—"

"—_you _just want to hear about a famous mage."

Niva blushed. She sounded like Isas. Gaping and batting her eyes over famous names. Hoping for the mere chance of talking with such a figure at the university—to brush their sleeve and feel glory on his fingers, mixed in with all the lint. "He is famous! I never met him."

The teasing again. "He's visiting—"

"—I am _not _chasing after anyone. Much less a man who could see me doing it a week before I dared!" Shaking her head, Niva took a pinch from one her jars, letting it scatter over her work in a larger, ceramic bowl in cedar green.

"He's just _Niko_," said Paras. "As you are just Niva, and your Isas is simply—"

"—he is _not my_—"

"He's surely more than the Poisoner's Assistant of Lightsbridge."

Niva went very still as Paraskeve came to her feet. The scrape of her chair was harsh against their new floor. "You are more than that, and so is he, is he not? But you _also _have stories."

"Not one _word_." The smaller girl's voice was a rough squeak. Niva did not recognise herself. Felt her breath catch and blood turn cold and slow inside her. Paras did not step closer, but Niva's hearing was sharper, somehow, than when she had woken that morning. Sharp enough to hear the rise and fall of the other's breath, cloth rustling as it fell about her from its sitting folds.

"The problem with stories," Paras said, the words soft and earnest and a shout in Niva's new silence, "Is that they can be wrong, sometimes. Forgive me. I've heard it used as an affectionate name—"

"—from people who should know better."

The silence left as quick as it came, and Niva's shoulders slumped. She stared down at her hands. They were small as ever, square-fingered, and dusted with tea leaves.

Abruptly, she stepped aside. "Here," she said, still not looking at her. "See if you can guess this one."

"Niva—"

"—_Paraskeve_."

Paras brushed past her, light, her face strained. But her eyes were wide as she bent forward over Niva's bowl, breathing deep. "Cinnamon, rose—"

"—No, rosehip. Deeper than petals. Rosehip, hyssop, orange peel. Honeybush tea. And," she swallowed. "Poppy. Just a little. So don't take it in the morning unless you're truly breathless." Niva felt a little breathless herself, watching as Para's back stiffened, just briefly, before she turned, and smiled.

"Where's it from, Niva? I can't tell."

"It's from here." She sniffed. "Just here. For you. I was experimenting. No need to cry over it."

Paras beamed. "Never that." She clapped together, the sound sharp and precise in the room's crowded air. "I think we're starting on the outside walls today? Help me, and I'll tell you a story you shall know is true."

"Listen. You may have had more of the large and sprawling sky than is good for anybody," Niva said, letting the words feel _good _in her mouth. "But I've been whitewashing walls since I could close my hand around a brush. You, little bird, _need me_."

It had taken Niva less than a month to learn that Paraskeve was one of those rare people it was impossible to hate.

* * *

The sky had not felt large to Paraskeve. She was out of poppy. Almost out of the willowbark, and her last tisane, despite the laws, had been cut with weeds.

("Hah. _No one _would—the the penalties alone—"

"Niva."

"Yes?"

"Wait.")

The sky was grey, that Longnight, and loaded with Summersea ice. Those crowding with her in the Ducal Square, however, could not be cold. There were too many of them, and a single excitement joined their heart beats into a single, echoing chant that shouted through their skin and seized their lungs. The dancer was coming. To them, to dance for _them_—she who had danced in nothing but pearls and adulation for the Emperor of Yanjing—

("Must have been a bit cold!")

—she who had worn an orchid in her hair for the Empress of Namorn, and sworn to dance solely for her, until it died.

("—Best week-to-ten-days or the _worst_, do you th—"

"—Niva!")

Yazmín Hebet, dancer of all the best days, was there for _them_. And Paras stood at the back, straining to see, to hide, to split into two places at once. Her heart, as the music began and the crowd heaved and gasped, seemed to skitter and jump out of line with the rest. Too fast, and a sharp force to close her eyes, though she did need them to see this woman.

Paras knew her every step from the crowd's shifting, fragile colours of awe and joy. She knew what outstretched palm came with that sort of gasp, and which cry pre-empted a leap that her small, hard body should never hold, except that it always did. The music was the _Kalisphoi_: Tharian drums and wailing strings keeping spare about her, never quite wrapping her form. Between backs and shoulders, Paras caught fingertips, a hennaed foot, matching the rust of her hair that brightened to blood under the new lights.

She was there. She was _there_, and her steps shook through two stages. There was one of fast-assembled board, and the other, which lay behind a theatre in Aliput, all dust that took to sweat and dyed their clothes to match the desert. Yazmín had danced there alone, head thrown back and eyes closed, while Paras watched, heart in her mouth.

Paras remembered the stained practise costume. The particular Tharian weave they had all embraced, due to the heat. One raucous rehearsal, she discovered it took a single pull of a single thread for the once-white fabric to unravel, and Yazmín had laughed in delight while fabric dissolved against her skin. Her heart beat to the second stage, while Summersea watched the first.

The music stopped. Only for a second, but that lapse of time means the life and death of some measures, and the crowd shifted awkwardly around her, breaking apart only to be held together by the tiny space. Words could be picked out from the mess of it.

"Look at her! She's—_Omnini _bless she's –"

"—yeah, just _look_. Right? It's all falling—"

"—Lakik's smiling _teeth_, she hasn't anything on."

(You're just making this up!"

"Oh, yes. The words, at least. I fainted around then.

"You _what_?"

"Fainted. Not at her naked glory or anything similar, Mila bless. _That_, I had seen before, and she would have kept on dancing, and been beautiful at it. I fainted because my heart was going to fast, which was all the fault of foxglove for the wheezes, and...")

"Magic."

When Paras woke, she was no longer a crowd. She blinked up at a man who had her leaning rather awkwardly against him on a stone bench, the rest of the city flowing around them like rather stained water. He was dressed in soft grey silks and staring at her with eyes the black of sloe berries as he told her impossible things.

"You fainted, Paraskeve, because you performed a work of magic."

"What?"" She would call the Watch on him. Useless as it probably was, she would call the Watch on him and at least _try_ to move out of his grasp. Once her head stopped spinning.

His tone was very dry, though she thought she saw him blush. "Every stitch simply _fell_ off her. And I'm Niklaren Goldeye."

* * *

Niva could not help laughing, as she stood back and surveyed their work, well timed to the end of Paras's ludicrous tale. Whitewash gleamed, and Paras had streaks of it up her arms and across her face, and all down her robes. Her expression was as solemn as Niva had ever seen it—and Niva had found, in these few months, it that it was difficult to look away from this woman's face—but her eyes sparkled like rain in sunlight.

"If you want to _not _faint like some maiden," she said. "Then don't take essence of foxglove without a Healer watching over you. Particularly if you're going to magic people out of their clothes."

Paras only laughed, and Niva flinched in surprise as Paras's long, slim arms went about her and she felt soft lips against her cheek.


	3. Floors and Windows

**Hearts and Houses**

_K. Ryan, 2010

* * *

_**3. Floors and Windows**

_A chapter of turning for the New Year. For the lovely Emberfyire, as always, but also for Kiwi, who has had the maddest of Christmases while snow in your hemisphere rages on. Happy 2011!

* * *

_

It was a glorious day. Paras, looking out at the concentric circles and blooming acacias laid out to the Temple's northern wall, thought it was as if the sun had somehow leaked into some of the brisk, ocean cool winds, and was taken anywhere it might want. It clung to dust and turned it elegant. As she sorted through another pile of thatch, the ragged flecks of plant matter that floated about her face and caught in her hair could have been daylight fireflies.

Her throat tightened. Breathing hard through her nose, lips pinched together, Paras pressed hard her chest. She _would_ not cough. Loose piles of thatch wove together loosely under her hands. She smiled, feeling the warm, sleepy strangeness of these fibres, and then Niva was laughing at her from the ground.

"You're mooning again."

"Sorry!" Paras leant forward over the roof, careful not to disturb her handiwork, and could see the other novice clearly: a pale figure in dirty white, figure with bright hair—her hat had slipped and was half down her back; the ridiculously unbecoming tie she used to keep it from flying away would be cutting into the skin above her collarbones—hands on hips. A sharp, confident stance, weight on the balls of her feet, and her neat, fine features blurring away as Paras felt her ribs work around lungs that were again empty of air, a spasm that ripped up from chest to the base of her throat and further still, wheezing out of her.

Her hands clenched. She bit through her lip, and she breathed. Thin and faint and determined. "Sorry!" This time, her voice managed to stumble away from her and off the roof. "They're so happy. This is a new life for them."

"A new life being _dead_? It's thatch, Paras."

"It's _fibre_." Her vision sparkled strangely now. Black burst and dots and red pulses in hectic time with her heartbeat. And Niva's laughter was lost as Paras began to cough.

* * *

Niva was not fond of heights. They didn't make her quake or faint, but they were unpleasant. And her hands left sweat streaks as she pushed her way through onto the half-thatched surface, because the sight of Paras as she was—hacking and wheezing and blue-tinged—was enough to leave anyone shaky.

Paras raised her head, and a hand. A warding gesture. "I'm—"

"—if you say you're fine I'm going to _throw you _down there!"

The other woman only coughed, and when Niva took her by the shoulders and shook her, unable to stop even if the _rage_ she felt, sharp in her muscles and mind, made her a wretched person, her head lolled forward and Niva could only scream.

She screamed once, loud enough that the grasses around the cottage, half dead or not, flattened themselves away from the sound. And then she stood, supporting all of the long, lean person that she could manage, and set to getting off the roof.

* * *

Niva had no interest in Isas and his project. It was, she felt, abominable.

She had told him so, often, when he had let dreams slip from his lips as easy as other people breathed, in the echoing passages of the University. He could come back, he had said, all fine hands and wild eyes and strange, devout beauty that she would never speak of and he would never accept, and he would _dedicate _himself. He would pour his vast personal fortune into the grounds of Winding Circle—no other Temple would do—and from this outward rush there would grow a house of glass and magic and a whole verdant world from which anything might come.

"Tell the bookkeepers about the _vast personal fortune_," she had said, "And you'll find yourself wearing borders before two years are up."

She would, perhaps, have felt bad for the hurt in his eyes if he hadn't kissed her. If there had been rules between them in those days, one was that there were no apologies between their bodies.

Now, she stood on the construction site. The chalk marks on the earth already looked like scars. It suited her mood.

"Begone, creature!"

Niva looked away from the earth. Isas was striding the way he had once said, in all seriousness, he had been taught. _A question of carriage_, he'd told her, shaking her head as she laughed herself to bits. His robes flapped about his ankles.

"No," she said.

This stopped him. "If all you deign to do is laugh—"

Niva glared at him. "Today," she said, "I might _need _something to laugh at."

"You look terrible."

"Thank you."

He did not open his arms, and she did not run to them. But she did sit on the ground, watching the bustle of Isas's worldly devotions, and pointed out every tiny flaw that she could see.

* * *

Niklaren Goldeye, no less, was attending to Paras by the time Niva returned to the cottage.

"Oh," she said, as the tall man turned and inclined his head to her, with obnoxious grace. "I thought she'd still be at the Water Temple." Her robes were streaked with mud and grass and her skin was grimy with the protective magic Isas had spent the hours driving into his work. The mage was dressed in greys and lavender, and looked perfect. Even if he couldn't grow a moustache. He raised heavy, dark eyebrows while she glowered at him.

"She's been given the magic she needs, and most of the medicine," he said, very soft. "What Paras requires most right now is rest."

"I..." Niva swallowed. "I'm a _terrible _nurse," she said, hating that it came out squeaking.

She expected the man to look stern. Instead, the sweet smile he gave lit the darkening room, and Niva found she was unable to look away. "With that," he said, "I may sympathise."

Niva's chest tightened. She clenched her hands and jerked her head back as she felt one curl of hair fall forward onto her sweating face. The man only looked at her.

"Master Niklaren, I had no _idea_ it was so—I'd never have let her work with thatch if I'd known it was likely to—the air's _thick _with pollen and she was _stupid, _but I'm—"

"—The question, Novice Niva, is not whether you are a good nurse, but whether, rather, you are a good friend. And it's Niko, please. I've heard you've never stood on ceremony. There's no reason to start. I'm not _quite _old."

With a polite little bow, Niko backed out of the room. By the time Niva could do more than splutter, the front door had clicked closed.

* * *

Darkness. Heaviness. Hands checking her brow and her throat and a strange, familiar sweetness in her mouth, as thick and vile as the time she snuck into the caravan's provisions of cider. Her teeth felt too large for her mouth. Her eyes were odd, weighted things that sunk deep into her head, so her eyelids barely covered them. If she opened her eyes, would there just be holes? Best not to try. Best to...breathe. She was breathing. Ribs stuck in her like teeth. In, and out. In. In. And a voice.

("So once, not very long ago, I lived at Lightsbridge. I didn't _want _to live at Lightsbridge, you understand, but it was a project for my novitiate, the way you've been given with this house. I'd have preferred the house. But I had the University. Isas and I.

"He _loved _it, because it meant we were the best, you see. And if love of the Circle hadn't slipped into his life like the strangest of secrets—which it did: I saw it happen—he would have gone there, and been Isas Ironwill or something just as daft, and been great. But he was a novice, just like me and nothing like me, and we went because of a game we made, which they thought the dry, Lightsbridge bodies could turn into skill.

Which they did, I suppose. We both worked hard, and everyone loved Isas, and everyone was afraid of me. Which is how it always would have been. And we were a year away from going home and my magic did feel sleeker and stronger and more disciplined than _before _I read the sleek, strong, disciplined books. Before Breakbone Fever walked into Kerang.")

Tears on her face. Cold, from a long fall. Not her own.

* * *

"_This one. This will surely work." _

_Xiyun Mountainstrider was not a large man, but his voice held his title, and there was no fear as he held the small bottle up to the light. Isas watched him, avid and drawn. Niva could not watch. Instead, she looked through the laboratory door at the waiting patients. _

"_Novice." _

_Niva twitched. Novice meant her. Isas was always 'Young Lord', which he put up with in good grace, Niva suspected, because he could not hear the humour in it. The Novice, blinking hard to remove the shades of the sick, shivering people from her eyes, turned back to their master. "Yes, sir?" _

"_Go and give this to those who need it." _

_Niva swallowed. "We—"_

"—_there is _always _need for further testing," he said, not misunderstanding her. The worst thing about this man, in this room, was that he rarely did. "But we have no time." _

_Isas, eyes red-rimmed, glared at her. "We both worked on this," he said. _

"_I know." _

"_Novice." _

"_I _know_." _

_Niva took the bottle, feeling it growing hot and clamorous under hand. A volatile mix of medicines that she knew as well as the lines in her palm. What she did not know was the way they would mix with another's blood and organs. Closing her eyes, she forced away the fevers of the last attempt, the sad, gurgling ends of the one before that: bone had strengthened, there, but only whilst muscle sloughed away. _

_She let herself breathe. Isas was right. They had worked on this. Mountainstrider was right. They had no time. None of them had any sleep. _

_As Niva let herself pass through the laboratory door, she heard Isas begin pestering their master again about a new way, a _better _way, that they had come up with while their eyes burned from magic and their hands kept still even as they were scalded and soaked my countless compounds. His timing was excellent. Mountainstrider was tired enough to listen. _

_But human essences would not help these people right now, who flinched away from her as she drew closer to them, and made the Gods circle across their chests. _

_They all knew, even as they swallowed what Niva gave them, that these trial cures would kill half of them, if they were lucky, and that the blood of the surviving would go into some new concoction, which would kill only a fraction less. _

Poisoner's assistant_, they called her and Isas both. And Niva could not blame them. _

"_Thank you," said one woman, both her arms already in slings as Niva held a cup to her lips and tilted her head back._

_When she said it again, Niva started to cry.

* * *

_

Warmth. Heaviness. An arm about her and the scent of another's hair, rich and sweet and soft against her shoulder. And fingers in her own curls, questing and tremulous and strange. Rough cloth and unsteady heartbeat against her skin.

"And so you see, Paras, I'm just _awful _with sickness, so you need to _tell me_ if you're ever feeling that bad. If you can't breathe. Don't just...I couldn't help you. And I never will. Ever. Oh, _stop that_, you'll hurt yourself."

Still not opening her eyes, Paras let her arms fit around this shaking, strangest of friends. Niva was small in her bed, but Paraskeve felt all of her, and it was an easy thing, even blind, to kiss tears from her cheeks.


	4. Home

**Hearts and Houses**

K. Ryan, 2011

* * *

**4. Home

* * *

**

They stood together in at temple services, novices pressed in a great, once-voiced huddle with the wall of coloured Dedicates on every side. Treasured—or herded—if symbolism was the sort of thing to keep anyone's attention. They all touched each other. Shoulder to shoulder, voices raised and blending, and a steady vibration came even from the throats of those who claimed, singly, that they could not sing. Each note licked out to join every other, and Niva's hand brushed Paras's as her warm, soft alto caught and covered the stitch-witch's surprisingly thready soprano tones.

_(Now?_

_Not yet.)

* * *

_

"When?"

Paraskeve was in what had become, through steady bursts of effort, her workroom. It was a place of lightness of which she thought even Niko might be proud, and she enjoyed her shiver of delight at the feeling of true Hajran linen in her hands, in this place she had her own, just as much as she enjoyed the fabric itself. Niva, standing in the doorway, was almost lost behind drifts of cloth that she had let pile up on tables on either side. Her jaw was set, her eyes level.

"When you're ready," Paraskeve answered, smiling as her friend flushed and scowled.

"I _am_."

* * *

Niva's workroom, this first summer, seemed to take in air and breathe out marjoram. The air was heavy with the scent of it, living and drying, its heavy, rich growth spilling from pots and small trenches, and sticking in the folds of Niva's robes. Paras closed her eyes in the cool sweetness of the place, while Niva bustled and snipped and brought herbs to her hands so they might be used in dinner.

"I know you're not, love. Not yet."

The word was not new, of course. But it was new for them, and felt good in her mouth.

"But you want to."

Niva did not know why she did not shout. She _should_ shout, surely. But instead, she looked up at Paras, who stood so serenely in another's private space, and watched as the other girl opened her eyes. They took in the green shadows on each other's faces.

"_That_," said Paras evenly, "Is only a fraction of what I want."

* * *

Evening light shivered through their kitchen, and Paras propped open one window to let the birdsong in, which made them both smile. Niva worked slowly in the flour, a slow and heavy rhythm that seemed to make the dough forming under her hands into _more _of itself. It grew and stretched and she pushed and pulled and slapped at it, warming and smoothing beneath her like something living. And she swore Paras would find it easy if she only tried. This was rubbish, but Paras let her hand come up to run gently across the stocky, taut shoulders, and lower along the curve of Niva's spine.

"You were _thin_ when you came here. You look so much better, now."

"It's all the bread. I grow fat off the scraps you leave me." Niva leant back into her hand, always working.

"Do you have a name, yet?"

Niva's hands stilled, and she turned a little to smirk up at Paras, who could not resist touching a falling lock of hair, bright and sleek from recent cutting. She let the tips run over the rounding curve of her cheek.

"_Now_?" Niva asked her, a little strangled.

"Not yet."

Niva swallowed. "Then I shan't tell you," she said, forcing herself back into her first conversation, and the growing loaf of bread.

* * *

The night was thick. Airless and slightly scorched. Paras was not sleeping. Sweat stuck the shift she wore to her body; no matter how politely she asked the cotton to repel such things. Her hair hung limp, parts of her stuck together in ways she could not bear thinking about, in this little stucco and wood house she had made her own. The ceiling pressed close.

"Paras?"

"Niva?"

A darker shadow in the gloom, small and sturdy and filling what air the space had left with nasturtium and new sweat and old clothing—different skin.

"It's cooler in my room. The plants help."

"I love you."

"Don't joke."

* * *

"I wasn't joking."

Niva was right. Her room, full of greenery lush with hoarded water, was cooler. A larger space, the bed-linens crisp from recent change and glorious against Paras's skin. They do not see more than the shapes of each other, Paras shifting out of the way as she feels Niva's slight weight change the texture of the sheets beneath her.

"I wasn't joking," she said once more. "I just...laugh at some things more than you do."

"I don't _want _to laugh at this. I _want_—"

"—it's laughter that keeps all the joy," she whispered, letting Niva's rough words move over and through her. She could feel the other girl's breath on her cheek. "And I think there can be joy, with you."

Niva swallowed, and Paras imagined the slow, helpless movement of her throat, and the pulse beating there.

"I feel that already," Niva mumbled. And Paras moved to hold her, despite the heat. She turned in the small space, and Paras could not stop a shudder as Niva's lips brushed her collarbone. Her neck. She shuddered and stretched, and Niva let her mouth open gently, allowing herself to taste and feel while Paras's hands tightened around her back.

"Not yet," she groaned. "But—"

"—but?" Niva felt laughter, now. It was rising slowly, nervous and strange. The room was very dark and their heartbeats very loud. And laughter pushed in her, at her, and some would do nothing but trickle into her voice, no matter how her body stabbed itself with frustration as Paras eased herself away.

"_Soon_, Rosie."

Niva whimpered. She could help it. She should be embarrassed, she was sure, but the flush to her skin was all heat and confusion and hope, and that laughter that had no reason to fill her, and yet never seemed to stop. "How did you _know_?"

"I know you enough to guess."

* * *

They stood together in temple services, though they knew they should not. It broke the pattern. The new Dedicate's dark green robes were a shout amongst all the white. Her whole body, brilliant and light with the euphoria that came from fasting and completion and newly made, longed for vows, could have been Mila's younger guise incarnate, riotous within a contained circle of the others who had welcomed her, and named her, and would have to live with her now. Paras stood by her side and brought her hand up to her lips, tasting marjoram and nasturtium, bright sweat and Midsummer salt.

The new Dedicate's voice faltered, and she glowered at the girl, who only smiled.

Dedicate Rosethorn kissed her, others in the circle singing louder to lift the interrupted song, and she felt words in her mouth. A promise.

_Now? Yes?_

_Yes. Let's go home._

Eyes closed, the part of her that could think and fly did a handstand on the roof.


End file.
